Flight from the USSR

Начало книги

I didn’t mean to publish this book. I naively believed that after the disintegration of the USSR, Georgia’s Soviet past would become a bitter memory. I was wrong. It turned out that the past can come back with a vengeance, especially if we can’t leave it behind.

We may have distanced ourselves from that country and those times, but we have failed to alter the mindset acquired while we were part of what was called the ‘Empire of Evil,’ when benevolence was scarce. A superpower that made groundbreaking advances during the ‘Space Race,’ could not manage to produce a simple pair of jeans. What can be more innocent than a pair of jeans? So if they couldn’t produce them, they just banned them.

These banned jeans became sweeter than forbidden fruit. Soviet youth were determined to get them at all costs and, not surprisingly, smuggling boomed. Occasionally, there would be a pair of genuine US jeans among those smuggled from all over the world. In those days, every pair of jeans was believed to be American and, as Soviet propaganda was particularly set on destroying American values, many of us thought that happiness lay where jeans were abundant.

Читать дальше →